You Can Now Send Money From Your Gmail

Ever dreamt of logging in to your email inbox and sending money to your loved ones instead of wading through an endless list of spam emails? Google got you covered. With Gmail and Google Wallet all that is entirely possible.

How do you go about it? As you’ll see in the video at the end of this post and in the photo below, you simply hit (okay, click on) the $ sign at the top of your Gmail editing panel/toolbar (accessible only by hovering over the attachment icon using your mouse pointer) to attach the money you want to send, key in the amount you wish to send and voila! It’s done. Just like that.

There are some prerequisites though: you must be using Google’s NFC-powered payment system, Google Wallet and tied your Google Wallet to your bank account so that you can use it. You can also send money using your credit or debit card of your tied account at some lowly rates set by Google and its partners in the Google Wallet venture i.e. financial institutions like banks.

There are some limitations as of now though: the process as outlined above will only work if you’re on your laptop or PC. For those who want to transfer funds from the comfort of their mobile devices (smartphone/tablet) you’ll need to visit wallet.google.com from your device’s default browser (not secondary or third party browsers!). Another thing, for us in Kenya and many other African countries Google Wallet support is limited and as such we’ll have to wait a little longer. Still, this will only be available to American citizens over the age of 18 in coming months.